Tamara’s early life is overshadowed by conflict and tragedy. Her father cannot escape his own childhood memories of war and hunger. Her mother is addicted to painkillers. They tell her that history is for those who have no present, yet Tamara instinctively knows that she must work through the tangled memories, assumptions and conflicts in her family’s history to discover who she is and where she belongs. For much of her childhood, she plays a secondary role, observing the drama unfold around her. Looking back, the narrator says she felt safer staying behind the scenes, and the episodes that she shares through the acts (not chapters) of the novel are presented to the reader without judgement. Yet as she grows older, she finds her voice and the courage to consider who she wants to be when the curtain falls on the prologue of her life.
The conceit that we are but characters in a play, acting out our parts, is hardly new (Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast’ being just two examples). Yet in the exquisitely constructed and executed Theatre of War, Chilean writer Andrea Jeftanovic pushes beyond the idea that we are bit players at the mercy of an unknown director, to show that an exploration of the past, with all its horror and tragedy, can ultimately be the route to creating (or recreating) one’s identity as an adult.
